To our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need.
ADAM PHILLIPSThere is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
-
-
Transgression is a quest for solitude
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
People change, but there really are limits.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
ADAM PHILLIPS -
There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
ADAM PHILLIPS -
There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe
ADAM PHILLIPS -
You write to find out what you believe.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
ADAM PHILLIPS -
We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality – to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting – but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
ADAM PHILLIPS